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On day one of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the crowds packed into the Fira Gran Via on the edge of Barcelona to see the latest in smartphones, network equipment, and a handful of wearables.

This is still a phone show, so it’s not surprising one had to poke around quite a bit to see smart watches and the like.

Fira Gan Via, site of Mobile World Congress for the third year in a row in 2015.

LG Electronics (066570KS) was one of the more aggressive in showing off, with its new “G Watch” line updated with two models: “Urbane,” and “Urbane LTE.” They both use Google’s (GOOGL) Android Wear operating system software. The normal Urbane connects to your smartphone for data. The Urbane LTE has a built in radio so it can make calls and act as a walkie-talkie. While the Urbane is expected to come to Europe and other places in a couple months, the Urbane LTE is for the moment only for South Korea.

Huawei’s entry into the Android Wear smartwatch battle.

The Urbane is familiar to anyone who owns a “G Watch R,” the round-face smart watch that LG came out with last fall. The difference is that the case is a bit sleeker, and it now comes in metal options of various finishes versus the strictly plastic exterior of the G Watch R. In the booth, LG dressed up the display for the watch by placing it in the context of various luxury items — elegant gloves, ties, leather accessories — as if to say, this is a real accessory, rather than a computer gadget.

The Huawei watch from the side.

Privately held Chinese networking and smartphone titan Huawei had an Android Wear watch as well, unveiled at its press conference yesterday. That was really your only chance to see it, as it is not being shown at the Huawei booth here. The Huawei watch is a bit slimmer, sleeker than the chunky LG Urbane.

What one notices about both the Urbane and the Huawei piece is that the screen resolution is quite a bit sharper than last year’s Android Wear pieces from LG and Samsung and Motorola. At the LG booth, a company rep explained to me that the Urbane’s pixel count hasn’t changed. Rather, the OLED display is closer to the cover glass, leading to sharper resolution.

LG’s second pass at a round-faced smartwatch, the “G Watch Urbane,” features metal finishes of various sorts this time.

Another face on the G Watch Urbane.

Huawei did have in its booth the “Talkband 2,” the second iteration of its bracelet introduced last year at the show.

The simple, shiny bracelet doubles as both a pedometer and a bluetooth microphone and earpiece — you take the display section out of the bangle and listen to it like a bluetooth earpiece.

Alcatel OneTouch, a division of TCL Communications (2618HK), also has its own offering this year, first introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. The watch doesn’t run Android Wear, instead opting for Alcatel OneTouch’s own version of Linux software. The device comes out this month for $149. The point of not being in the Android camp is that unlike Android Wear, and unlike Apple’s (AAPL) forthcoming Apple Watch, the watch can support both iOS and Android-based devices.

LG’s other version of the Urbane, the “Urbane LTE,” has a built-in Qualcomm radio chip to make calls all on its own, or to communicate with another watch owner as a walkie-talkie.

Alcatel OneTouch’s $149 smartwatch eschews Android Wear for a version of Linux instead, so it works with either Android or iPhone’s iOS.

Research firm Strategy Analyticsthis morning reported that Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone took 89% of all smartphone profits in Q4 of 2014, up from 71% a year earlier, while devices running Google‘s(GOOGL) Android software plunged from 29.5% in Q3 of 2013 to just 11.3%.

Total smartphone operating profit was up 31%, year over year, at $21.2 billion, said the firm.

Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston posited that Google’s in trouble if its partners can’t make money:

Apple iOS continues to tighten its grip on the smartphone industry. Apple’s strategy of premium products and lean logistics is proving hugely profitable. Android’s weak profitability for its hardware partners will worry Google. If major smartphone manufacturers, like Samsung or Huawei, cannot make decent profits from the Android ecosystem, they may be tempted in the future to look at alternative platforms such as Microsoft, Tizen or Firefox.

Research firm IDC this afternoon announced results for smartphone market share consistent with reports in January that Apple (AAPL) retook share from Google’s (GOOGL) Android thanks to the success of the iPhone 6.

Out of 1.3% billion smartphones shipped globally in 2014, says IDC, 81.5% ran Google’s Android, while 14.8% ran Apple’s iOS operating system. Those share numbers were an increase for Google for the year of 2.8 percentage points, a decline for Apple of three-tenths of a point.

However, in Q4, Apple’s share rose from 17.5% to 19.7%, while Google’s slipped from 78.2% to 76.6%. Those numbers are similar to data released in late January by Strategy Analytics.

IDC analyst Melissa Chau writes that the bigger picture was how iOS and Android, combined, increased their overall dominance of smartphone operating systems to 96.3% in Q4 from 95.6% in the year-earlier quarter. The two further shut out competing efforts such as BlackBerry (BBRY) and Microsoft (MSFT):

What will bear close observation is how the two operating systems fare in 2015 and beyond […] Instead of a battle for the third ecosystem after Android and iOS, 2014 instead yielded skirmishes, with Windows Phone edging out BlackBerry, Firefox, Sailfish and the rest, but without any of these platforms making the kind of gains needed to challenge the top two […] This isn’t to say that vendors aren’t making moves, especially for the growth segments – the low-end markets. With Microsoft bringing ever-cheaper Lumia into play and Tizen finally getting launched to India early this year, there is still a hunger to chip away at Android’s dominance.

BlackBerry’s share slipped to 0.4% of shipments in Q4, IDC believes, down from 0.6% a year earlier, while Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system was at 2.8%, down from 3%.

Following on last night’s press releases about Apple’s (AAPL) smartphone gains in Q4, research firm Strategy Analytics this morning said Apple gained market share for its iOS operating system in the quarter at the expense of Android, the operating system maintained by Google (GOOGL) and used by vendors such as Samsung Electronics (005930KS) and other phone and tablet makers.

Although Android was running 81% of the total 1.28 billion smartphones shipped in all of 2014, its share in Q4 dropped to 76.7% from 78.3% a year earlier.

Apple’s iOS saw its share rise to 19.6% from 17.6% in Q4, the firm said. Apple has previously had smartphone share above 20%, so the latest data mean the company has retaken some share it lost in recent years.

The last time Apple had over 20% share of smartphone OSes was in Q4 of 2012, when it had 22%, according to Strategy Analytics. Apple’s all-time high was in Q4 of 2011, when it had 23.6%.

Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Phone operating system more or less held steady at 3% versus 3.3% a year earlier.

Moody’s Investors Service analysts Mark Stodden and colleagues late Friday waded into the debate, writing that any entry by Google would be “credit negative for the incumbent wireless carriers,” with the biggest threat to AT&T and Verizon, “as Google’s new service may further increase price competition.”

Google wants to change the landscape, they write:

We believe that Google intends to shape the wireless industry to its own benefit by threatening to overbuild industry incumbents, just as it has with Google Fiber (see our report “Google’s Fiber Push Aims to Jar Incumbent Cable, Telco Operators”). Google’s wireless service may succeed where other MVNO’s have failed because Google’s profit motive is driven by advertising revenue, not wireless service revenue. If Google can use ad dollars to offset or subsidize wireless service prices, this could further disrupt industry pricing. The high value of targeted mobile advertising and the emergence of mobile video content distribution are the likely motivation behind Google’s launch.

Stodden and co. point out past involvement by Google in wireless regulation and spectrum trading:

Google has been active in technology and regulatory discussions as the FCC explores public and private sharing of unlicensed spectrum in the 3.5 GHz frequency band. Google is participating in the development of this architecture/spectrum scheme alongside incumbent carriers and the equipment and chip makers. Commercial deployment is many years away and Google won’t have any exclusive rights to utilize the technology, but Google’s active involvement is meaningful. In the past Google has used its balance sheet to influence the industry’s evolution. In 2008 Google bid $4.7 billion in the 700 MHz spectrum auction to ensure open access requirements on the C-block. Verizon won the C-Block and became a key early adopter of Google’s Android operating system (an open system). Verizon needed a strong smartphone alternative to the iPhone, which was exclusively sold through AT&T at the time. With Verizon’s heft, Android secured a strong position and cemented Google into the mobile internet.

The one thing that may help AT&T and Verizon, the authors write, is that Sprint and T-Mobile’s spectrum makes them “sub-scale” compared to the two bigger industry leaders, and therefore they may not be able to offer Google cheap enough capacity to make the end price to consumers undercut AT&T and Verizon:

Unless they sell to Google below cost, Sprint and T-Mobile may not be able to offer a price low enough for Google to undercut AT&T and Verizon, who both have vastly superior cost structures. Even still, Google’s ability to subsidize the wireless service with alternative revenue sources could make it a tough competitor.

JMP Securities’s Alex Gauna today reiterated an Outperform rating and a $150 price target on Apple (AAPL), after reflecting on last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, at which “in my view, Apple was the big winner,” he says.

Following his report to clients this morning, Gauna was kind enough to spend a few minutes by phone discussing that view.

His main contention is that nothing from Google’s (GOOGL) Android software, and partners that use it, seemed to pose a major threat at the show, and that by contrast, there was much more energy focused on Apple’s own “ecosystem,” meaning, tying devices to its iOS software:

What did we see at CES? Autonomous vehicles and such were a big crowd pleaser, and Mercedes did some great stuff. But that’s a concept car. It’s a few years away. There were drones galore. That was also a big crowd pleaser, and a lot of fun, too.

And then there were wearables galore, which ties back to Apple. It’s about what did and didn’t happen. I did not see an Android ecosystem showstopper. There were advances, and there were attractive devices. But I didn’t see the complete string of use cases or the product breadth to make me think there was something dangerous for Apple at the show.

Conversely, when I look at home automation, and at many of the new apps out there, first and foremost, they wanted to play nicely with iOS. The half of North Hall [of the Las Vegas Convention Center] dedicated to Apple accessories, that’s where I saw the greater energy, the greater breadth of offerings. So, Apple came away the big winner. That is the big picture. The iPhone has been the big success and people are wondering what’s next. I think it’s the ecosystem around the devices. The iPhone is the single device of choice, they are the undisputed leader as far as a single device. Android has tremendous success, but in terms of a single device from a single vendor, it’s Apple. Add to that the accessories, the wearables, and all the home automation that wants to be compatible with iOS, and that creates a flywheel that begets future success.

Gauna, after looking at numerous smartwatches, is also encouraged about Apple Watch, though he thinks it will take some time.

I’m not the world’s biggest bull on the Apple Watch out of the gate, but the door is wide open for them to transform the category to make it a successful category. I think ti’s probably “Watch 2″ where we get liftoff.

Regarding the stock, he thinks it’s cheap and has room to rise above his $150 target:

The multiple is 1x right now. I think there’s room for upside. What it takes is for people to understand the flywheel of opportunity. There is a bull case to be made around iPhone 7, and the ecosystem — HomeKit, HealthKit, Car Play, etc. First hands on around car play. That was illuminating, just seeing how well that worked. Again, with the android offering, more energy around the Apple offering. Tested the Parrot, Panasonic, Ford was talking about it. There were a few.

As far as estimates, Gauna tells me his firm “is a dime ahead of the Street for the December quarter,” and that’s in part based on data out over the weekend for Taiwanese ODMs Hon Hai and Pegatron, the two biggest Apple manufacturers. “They showed accelerated growth to 16%, year over year, in line with what we are looking for,” says Gauna.

“Going forward, we’re hoping the later-than-typical Chinese New Year, February 19th, gives a lot of runway for Apple to have a more robust March quarter, especially with the iPhone now carried by the Chinese operators.

How does the “flywheel” pay off for Apple? It still comes down to share gains, he writes, and in that respect, he’s not too worried about smaller Chinese smartphone makers such as Xiaomi and Oppo:

Apple have an opportunity for share gains. The payoff would be some market share gain for iPhone. For Q3, it did show up to an extent — we saw Samsung [Electronics (005930KS)] losing, and Apple gaining. The wrinkle for that was that the Chinese OEMs were growing even faster than Apple. But considering that is a smaller base of sales for the Chinese companies, I’m not as alarmed about the Chinese for Apple. They are, however, very dangerous for Samsung and LG. And some others. The Apple position is so differentiated. For the time being, there is room for Apple to win alongside the Chinese. I’m looking at Apple’s share gains versus the major brands, not so much about them versus China. And even within the total market, Apple’s still improving their share.

As far as risks, the diminished rate of growth for iPad is certainly a concern, though not one to diminish his enthusiasm:

This is the world’s largest maket-cap story; you have to look at it from many angles. Of course, you have to be a little concerned about the diminished momentum for iPad, which is in part a result of Increased competition from Android. But the phone is really the lynchpin. Based on what was shown at CES, we’re going to be caring increasingly about all of those devices [that connect to iPhone]. We’ll be caring about how iPhone interfaces with your wearables, with home automation, with cars, with your digital life. And so I think because of the success for iPhone getting share gains back in motion, if you see one in four people in US with iPhone, doesn’t that create a gravity unto itself? That’s what I felt like I could start to taste at CES.

Gauna maintains the positive news flow for Apple today is a change from two years ago, when “Apple stock was working because of financial engineering but the company was losing share rapidly to Android.”

“Now, I see the reverse. Through iPhone 6 and the ecosystem of partners, and the energy around it at CES, that can change the equation into 2015.”

And what if Android makes a stronger showing later this year? “Apple’s going to have some more revelations this year, and Android, too, but my overall takeaway from CES was, it was a positive for Apple.”

On a side note, Gauna opines today’s news out of memory chip maker SanDisk (SNDK), that it is cutting its Q4 view, means good things for Apple because probably the company’s cost to put NAND flash in its products will go lower, helping gross profit.

Yota Devices’s YotaPhone 2 has a normal OLED display on one side and a black and white e-ink display on the other. Seen here is the music player app running on the e-ink screen.

It’s old news for many gadget fans, but it was exciting for me to get a first-hand glimpse Tuesday night of the “YotaPhone 2,” a new smartphone from Russian outfit Yota Devices that went on sale in the last couple of months.

The YP 2 has two different screens: a conventional color display on the front of the handheld, and a black and white e-ink display on the back reminiscent of Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Kindle e-book reader.

It may not be an Apple (AAPL) iPhone, but the YotaPhone has the virtues of both being novel and also conserving battery life by letting one do a lot on the e-ink screen, which uses a lot less power and can be easier to read in direct sunlight.

The company was on hand at the ShowStoppers gadget preview for press on Tuesday with the second version of the handset; the first one was shown here back in 2012. The newer model features enhanced responsiveness for the e-ink black and white screen and an upgrade of its Qualcomm (QCOM) chipset.

In the demo I received, the e-ink screen was vibrant and made use of a not-unattractive simplified display. However, responsiveness, while not bad, was noticeably slower than a standard smartphone screen.

Outside a ballroom at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, hundreds lined up before Samsung Electronics‘s (005930KS) press conference for the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show. That meant many others, including this reporter, were turned away from a filled ballroom and sent to an upstairs facility to watch the proceedings on a big TV, how fitting!

He talks about having delivered the “largest UHD TV lineup.” Baxter said half of the company’s UHD set sales are curved models, proving consumers see the value of curving displays.

Baxter says the company is in its third generation of wearable technology, and has 60% market share. A huge opportunity is the smart home, he says, where a third of consumers express interest, but fewer than 2% actually own the products.

Baxter meanders through various product categories, including new products for the cooking crazy, such as a special tablet computer for chefs. Then there is the “Milk” music service, which is coming to the company’s television set. A new version, called “Milk VR,” will combine the service with the company’s “Gear VR” virtual reality headset, delivering a 24-hour stream of virtual reality videos. Users of Gear VR can download the Milk VR app today.

After announcing Milk VR, Baxter brings on stage Davis Alpert, executive producer of the series “The Walking Dead.” He notes his production company will be producing a series of short-form videos exclusively for Milk VR.

And then, it’s off to EVP Joe Stinziano. This gentleman, you’ll recall, had to put up with the antics of Michael Bayon the stage a year ago.

He notes Samsung has led the market for TVs for nine years. Customers, he says, “absolutely love our curved displays.”

“But we need to do more,” he says.

The company is bringing together an “eco-system,” the “UHD Alliance,” consisting of studios, distributors and others, to set guidelines.

Stinziano brings up Mike Dunn of 20th Century Fox Studios, a member of the Alliance, who briefly says nice things about Samsung’s products.

Stinziano moves into talking about a new version of UHD sets, “SUHD,” which uses Samsung’s “nano-crystal semiconductors” to boost color and brightness. The technology can be seen in the recent movie “Exodus,” in which things such as the armor worn by the soldiers was enhanced digitally in post production to get a more striking look.

The new SUHD sets, explains Stinziano is designed with art and architecture in mind, in things such as the bezel.

Henceforth, all Samsung “smart” UHD TVs will be powered by the Tizen operating system, which Samsung has been backing for some time now. Tizen, which already powers Samsung’s wearables, such as the “Galaxy Gear,” has been speculated upon for some time by Wall Street and industry analysts as Samsung’s bid to provide a counter-balance to Google‘s (GOOGL) Android.

Samsung’s move to Tizen is in contrast to Sharp (6753JP), which this morning said it would move its line of smart TVs to Android.

From here, the presentation takes a strange turn, with a discussion of how Samsung appliances in the kitchen — “where some of people’s fondest memories are — is being transformed by Samsung appliances to let people “discover their inner chef.”

Celebrated chefs Michel Troisgros, Chris Kostow, and Daniel Bouloud are invited on stage. They cheer Samsung innovations, such as a “virtual flame” that is displayed on the electric stove to let cooks know how intense the heat is. Samsung is taking the chef collaboration further with a new cooking app for Android, and a new “chef tablet,” a Galaxy brand tablet pre-loaded with the app.

LG Electronics’s “G Watch R” comes as closer than most smart watches so far to looking like a traditional sport watch.

There’s a new smartwatch on the block that’s turning heads, the “LG G Watch R,” from LG Electronics (066570KS), and I’ve been testing it for the last three weeks.

I’m a believer in the smartwatch movement. People think it’s silly to buy another thing when a phone does just fine. But the use case is real, interest by consumers is real, and as the pricing and features are perfected, the category will take off.

The G Watch R costs $325 with tax and is sold online and through carrier stores. I bought mine at an AT&T store.

The pre-loaded faces of the G Watch R are designed to look fairly normal, but I found them not that attractive.

The watch functions by pairing with a smartphone running Google’s (GOOGL) Android software and does not work with iPhones. The phone gives it alerts and connects it to the Internet. It can’t do much without the phone except tell the time, measure your heart rate, and play music (using a wireless headset).

I tested the watch with a Samsung ElectronicsGalaxy S5 and a MotoX from Lenovo‘s Motorola division.

Overall, the watch is interesting, promising, but not quite there for mainstream use. For friends who are Android techies/enthusiasts, it may be enough of a curiosity to be a holiday gift. Not so for most ordinary folks.

The G Watch R distinguishes itself by having a round face, but the thing makes no attempt to stand out by its looks: it is decidedly dull. Its band and case look like an ordinary black sport watch, with a very plastic feel. If it didn’t have electronic functions, the G Watch R might sell for $50.

A nice eye-catching face by UhrArt, available in Google’s Play Store.

However, the glowing face of the display is sufficiently bright and sharp that it does draw attention. People constantly asked me about it in bars and restaurants. A woman stopped me in Grand Central Station and asked, “Excuse me, your watch glows?” For some people, that kind of attention-grabbing accessory may be worth the price.

The main task is to show the time, and the watch ships with a variety of digital watch faces that can be selected. They are not particularly attractive.

Fortunately, because this is Android, you can load onto the watch numerous other faces from an expanding ecosystem of designs by software developers who are doing some really clever and attractive work.

In general, the 320 x 320 pixel display doesn’t do well with subtle watch faces that show slender clock hands or that have fine details. My favorites were therefore those that used large blocks of color.

The watch can display info by momentarily obscuring the clock face with an incoming bit of text.

Another nice third-party face, “Radial,” by Miles Oberstadt, makes use of the bold, brilliant AMOLED display of the watch.

Phone calls are one area where the watch shines. You can see a person’s name and picture flash on the watch screen, and you can accept it or reject it by sliding your finger across the display in the direction of either a green or red circle. You can place calls by speaking the person’s name — speech recognition is built in just as with a phone.

Another good area is doing Web searches, where you can amaze friends and win bar bets. A question such as “How old is Barack Obama?” brings up the relevant snippet of text from Wikipedia (53 years old). So does a query such as “Who is the tallest player in the NBA?” (Hasheem Thabeet, 7’3″.)

Google can send alerts to the G Watch R about gate changes for your flight, changes in stock prices, how long your commute may take, etc.

This may prove useful, but you have to spend some time training Google on the phone so that it knows what you’re interested in. I’ve never been a heavy user of Google’s “Google Now” service, so the alerts that I received on the watch seemed rather random and not especially useful.

The “Weather Wear Watch Face,” by Pizza Entertainment, gives you most of the things you’d want to know in a single glance.

I’m happy to say battery life was good during all of this. I regularly found I had 30% to 40% of battery left at the end of a full day of wearing the watch. However, I was probably only getting modest use out of the device, so your results may vary quite a bit from what I experienced.

From there, things go downhill. You can receive a text message, but you can’t reply without taking the phone out of your pocket. If you initiate a text, by saying the person’s name, the G Watch R will often ask you to pick which number you want to send to, even if a contact has only one number marked as mobile.

There were too many such areas where the watch gave up after the initial pass and handed things off to the phone.

Alerts that I expected to receive for Facebook or Twitter didn’t always show up. I expect that is simply an area of software development that needs further tweaking. And with all notifications of any kind, once the bit of text is viewed the first time, it disappears. This is frustrating, as it would be nice to go back and view the alerts later on.

There were some software glitches now and then, such as the watch becoming disconnected from the phone and needing to be paired again. Although voice commands work well generally, I wanted the watch to be quicker when picking up what I was saying.

By either speaking the phrase “Ok, Google,” or tapping on the watch face, the voice assistant wakes up and listens for your command.

Overall, then, if you want a glowing round screen on your wrist that will draw attention; if you want a better way to handle phone calls without fishing for your phone; if you want to look up an address for a restaurant or check a factoid just by extending your arm; and if you want brief alerts in a relatively easy fashion, the $325 price may be worth it to you.

For everyone else, the device’s capabilities are simply too immature.

In September, at the Apple Watch unveiling Apple (AAPL) held in Cupertino, I viewed Apple’s wearable offering up close. It is beautiful. The styling and the materials are so good, it would be worth the price on looks alone. People laugh at the square design of the thing, but as the G Watch R shows, the shape doesn’t matter if the watch is basically not attractive.

Apple will confound assumptions and make the shape iconic, as it always does. The functionality of the Apple Watch is much more extensive, and better thought out. People point out this was a controlled demo, not final product. That doesn’t matter: When the iPhone was first shown in January of 2007, its features weren’t fully baked. Six months later, it was ready.

Alerts such as weather updates first appear as small snippets, or stubs, on top of the clock face…

At this point, the Apple Watch has what it takes to capture the imagination of consumers. If the plastic G Watch R, with primitive looks and less-sophisticated functions can turn heads as it did in my experience, the Apple Watch will do so much more intensely.

That is the target of Google and its partners; I expect they will enhance and refine their offerings to make themselves more competitive.

Read more: I’m indebted to many others who’ve written reviews of the G Watch R, and of Android, from which I drew insights. Many of them have already pointed out things that I brought up in this review, and in some cases, in greater depth. Jeffrey Yuwono at The Cornerplay took on the entire phenomenon of Android Wearables in late September, writing that the technology “is that pimply teenager,” with lots of promise but basically immature.

Vlad Savov of The Vergehas an in-depth review of the watch, concluding that “It could be both smarter and more charming, but as a step along the path to developing a real smartwatch, it’s a solid stride forward.”

…but swiping over the watch face brings up the full view of the information.

Eric Mack with Gizmagin August wrote that there are five things the Android technology needs, including “more functionality.”

And Phandroid’s Joe Fedewa in November wrote of “7 things I hate about Android Wear,” chief among which is that the sytem of alerts is “a rudimentary system that desperately needs more.”

Speaking queries such as “who is the tallest player in the NBA?” grabs the relevant snippet of text from the Web.

Shares of Cirrus Logic (CRUS) are up 2 cent at $22.98, after Oppenheimer & Co.’s Rick Schafer raised his rating on the shares to “Perform” from “Underperform” as part of a broad review of chip prospects for 2015.

Similar to a report yesterday from Barclays’s Blayne Curtis, Schafer has decided that the exhaustion of Cirrus’s net-loss carry forwards, and a resultant higher tax rate in 2015, is a negative development that is now fully baked into the stock.

Writes Schafer,

The expiration of CRUS’ US NOLs has long been looming on the horizon. With the NOLs set to expire in March, we believe the element of uncertainty is now lifted. Further, we are modeling CRUS’ tax rate in the mid-20s longer term, as mgmt capitalizes on WLF’s 20% tax rate.

“WLF” in this case refers to Cirrus’s August acquisition of Wolfson Microelectronics.

Like Curtis, Schafer makes a claim, albeit a small one, of a recapture of business at Apple, writing that after seeing its revenue share in Apple’s (AAPL) products fall, “CRUS’ new 55nm “Smart Codec” (integrated codec+DSP) could help reverse this trend.”

Moreover, he also sees some improved prospects for the company’s chips in devices running Google‘s (GOOGL) Android operating system:

WLF also helps CRUS’ Android efforts, in our view. WLF’s share loss story as mainstream/lower end Samsung devices migrate to 4G is well understood at this point, and we look for Samsung (less than 10% of combined company sales) to provide a modest tailwind to CRUS’ C1Q outlook ahead of the flagship GS6 launch.

Up 39% in 2013, and 24% in 2014, the SOX has given semiconductor investors one of the best sustained moves in recent memory. Relative macro stability along with a dearth of obvious inventory excess supports our late- middle innings view of the cycle, though structural and secular changes could send us to extra innings. Thus, we prefer a thematic/stock selective approach, favoring names that deliver stand-out (profitable) growth, margin stability/expansion and attractive capital allocation. Thematically, we continue to like rising RF complexity/content over next the next two to three years as 4G devices and band counts increase (AVGO/ SWKS/QRVO); the 4G BST upgrade cycle over next 3-5yrs (ADI/CAVM); and rising automotive semi content over the next decade-plus (FSL/ADI/LLTC/NXPI). With the SOX sitting near 14-year highs, stock picking remains key in 2015. Our 2015 top picks are CAVM, MPWR, AVGO, NXPI and SWKS. Our underperformers remain AMD/ MRVL.

About Tech Trader Daily

Tech Trader Daily is a blog on technology investing written by Barron’s veteran Tiernan Ray. The blog provides news, analysis and original reporting on events important to investors in software, hardware, the Internet, telecommunications and related fields. Comments and tips can be sent to: techtraderdaily@barrons.com.